Some bands reunite because they need the money. Others are motivated by professional nostalgia, or boredom. When the Go-Betweens’ Robert Forster and Grant McLennan got back together after a decade apart to record 2000’s Friends Of Rachel Worth, with Sleater-Kinney as their rhythm section, it seemed fated: a matter of yin rejoining yang.
As good as these Aussies were apart — and McLennan’s nineteen-song Horsebreaker Star was as rewarding and replayable a collection of alt-pop-rock as was released during the ’90s — they reach their full potential playing off each other’s contrasting sensibilities. Oceans Apart again reveals Forster as the flinty realist and McLennan as the edgy romantic, but the songs thrive on their interlocking precision, carrying you from sagacity to wonder and back again.
“Darlinghurst Nights” trots out jottings from an old journal, but all the tunes have the quality of firsthand observations that urgently need to be committed to the page, from the jangly opener “Here Comes A City” (“Just pulled out of a train station/We’re moving sideways”) to the conjuring “No Reason To Cry” (“What would you do if you turned around/And saw me beside you/Not in a dream but in a song?”).
Folk leanings and all, the Go-Betweens are a pop band — if, at this point, with all the changing personnel (which this time out includes clarinet and horns), they can be called a band — but not in a Beatley or Squeezey or Crowded Housey way. There is a hard, sometimes brittle quality to the melodies and an agreeably aggressive thrust to the words. But like all great pop bands, this one does what it has to do — sink in its hooks.